Fight for your gear in The Division's PvP battles

Divide and conquer

The Division is taking a cutthroat approach to player vs. player battle. Ubisoft's next-gen, online, open-world shooter makes players comb through a quarantined city to collect gear and supplies. That makes each encounter, where players can lose their hard-fought stuff to other players, particularly thrilling.

"We want player versus player to be meaningful," game director Ryan Bernard told OXM. "And the way player versus player gets meaningful is you need to have something to lose--it's not just a scorecard in a multiplayer map."

Bernard didn't explicitly say how much players stand to lose in a given encounter, but he did say some kind of effortful mechanic will allow them to keep their gear even after they die--so less painful than DayZ.

"This is a world that's coming apart so even though you're a member of the Division, it's a scary place. I think another part of doing PvP well is not knowing where the threat is coming from, not knowing who is the threat necessarily. We really want to play with that, to enhance the experience."